I don't know for sure, but I would guess not. This gives quite a full account of him (hit CTRL+F and type in Vasa to find the relevant part of the thread), and while he appears to have been quite the ladies' man there is no mention of any children. Had there been any, then considering all the other detail given I imagine they would have been mentioned. Of course, one or more of the wives he seduced may have borne his child, passed off as her husband's, but we are never going to know about that. It would be very interesting to find a surviving descent from this Vasa branch, but I don't expect it to happen.

Note 3/7/14: This post, the preceding one to which it was a reply and the next two all appeared originally in the 1660 topic and were moved here so that new material for that topic could appear in uninterrupted sequence with the old.

Yes, I remember having that discussion before. Maybe she is and maybe she isn't; that information as I recall comes from the startlingly unreliable Burke's Guide to the Royal Families of the World Volume II: Africa & the Middle East, which if it told me the sun rose on a particular day I'd want it verified. OK I exaggerate, but it can't be regarded as a credible source. Nevertheless I have looked further and better into the overall question and amended my footnote to be more detailed and accurate.

It was always my intention to have the threads here pinned in date order, making it easy to find any particular one. However when Theodore as moderator tried to do this yesterday he found that it couldn't be done, the pinned threads appeared to take on a random order. He made me a moderator so I could have a try, but my success was no better. Eventually we discovered that, unlike other forums where I have done similar things with no difficulty, pinned threads here behave in relation to each other exactly like unpinned threads; that is, the one with the most recent post is on top, the one with the next most recent post is below that, and so on.

I still wanted to get the threads arranged, and the only way I could think of to do it was to pin and lock the threads, then post in each in the reverse order to the one I wanted them to appear in. So that is what I have done. This thread will remain unlocked, and any comment anyone wants to make about any of the other threads can be made and responded to here. Each thread now has a new post, but they all say the same thing; replies should be to this thread. So don't bother reading any of them, just mark all as read. If I make any changes of significance to any of the threads I will advise here that I have done so. I apologise for any inconvenience caused by this way of doing things, but it's not quite as eccentric as it may seem; the other threads are mainly there for reference, and I don't really see too much problem with any discussion of them (not that I anticipate much) being here.

Originally Posted by PeterAlso swept away by the conflict were four more of Europe’s monarchies: Bulgaria, Italy, Romania and Yugoslavia.

Regarding World War II, you could have included Albania, though King Zog had already been ousted by the Italians by the time of the invasion of Poland. But Albania remained nominally a monarchy (officially under Victor Emanuel III of Italy 1939-43) until the Communists abolished it in January 1946. While Zog (as far as I know) was not related to other European monarchs, his wife Queen Geraldine was.

True, both of these points, though I won't alter the thread as the Albanian monarchy was already no more than nominally in being at the war's start (Vittorio Emanuele III never had a claim to be king there, any more than he had to be Emperor of Ethiopia, and acknowledged as much when renouncing the titles). Queen Geraldine was descended (stage 1: stage 2), as you know, from Johann Georg IIof Anhalt-Dessau, maternal grandfather of Jan Willem Friso, Prince of Orange. As the latter is the most recent common ancestor of all ten current sovereigns, King Zog's descendants are thereby related to all those sovereigns. And, along with Queen Geraldine, all those of 1939, just checked.

I only just realized that the original version of the current chart at my own website has been out of date since the Dutch abdication on April 30. Rather than redo it, Peter, I've simply added links to both your 21 July 2013 chart and to this section of the forum in general.

Thanks for the links, perhaps they will direct a few more people who might be interested to the various threads. However, I think you perhaps need a link to the key for the second 2013 chart as well. There is no point in me even trying to get the key into the same post; I have tried with other similar charts and there is no possibility, the size limit is well exceeded with the key included.

The limit is 65,000 characters, which in most situations would be enough. However, when I post the charts the forum software automatically converts them to HTML, doing (despite some rather unfair complaints I have made in the past) a pretty impressive job of it. Unfortunately it takes a lot of HTML to accurately represent the charts and the limit is often exceeded. In the case of the charts in the 1952-2013 thread it is very nearly so, precluding inclusion of the key in the same post. I have by the way tried actually saving charts in HTML rather than Excel format before posting, and it doesn't help at all.

The last post in the 1713 thread, #9, has now been turned into an, as it were, addendum to the addendum to the thread, rather than a simple notice of it being locked. The addendum analysed the descents of Elizabeth II from the Emperor Ferdinand I, the most recent major Catholic sovereign to be a universal ancestor of present-day Protestant royalty. By way of a comparison, the further addendum does the same thing for a current Catholic sovereign of similar generation, King Juan Carlos I. The contrast produced is rather spectacular, even though it is an expected consequence of the religious divide of the last half-millennium. I edited the existing post rather than do a new one as otherwise I would have had to re-order all the threads again; hopefully one day Website Toolbox will change the way pinned threads are ordered (and yes, I have suggested it to them, though if they will ever take notice who knows), and then new posts would no longer be a problem and the threads could be unlocked.

I have made some changes to the 1517 note on posterities (post #5). In the second footnote, I have via links now traced rather than merely asserted descent from Christian II of Denmark, Sweden and Norway to more contemporary sovereigns of his realms. Then, feeling that the existing four footnotes weren’t quite enough, I added a fifth and really lengthy one, actually positioned third.

I had been troubled for some time by the airiness of my dismissal of possible posterity of Henry VIII. After all, many people including reputable scholars believe that such posterity exists, and includes the Queen through her mother. I do in fact know quite a lot about the question, which I take seriously as I do all such, and I have grounds for my belief, or rather lack of it. The added footnote now sets out some of these grounds.

With unacknowledged natural children, particularly those resulting from adultery as the two in question would have, for me there has to be something approaching moral certainty before a paternity different to that of record can be imputed. I feel that this condition is fulfilled with Queen Marie of Yugoslavia’s being the daughter of Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich rather than her mother’s husband Ferdinand I of Romania, and Prince Alexander and Princess Marie of Hesse and by Rhine being the children of Baron August von Senarclens de Grancy rather than Grand Duke Louis II.

It also is with Princess Louise Auguste of Denmark and Norway being the daughter of Count Johann Struensee, not her mother’s husband Christian VII. These four are the only individuals in all these charts to whom I have ascribed a paternity other than their legal paternity of record, and this includes natural children, all those mentioned in the various notes on posterities having been acknowledged.

I felt when I wrote the 1517 note that Henry and Elizabeth Carey’s being unacknowledged children of Henry VIII did not come anywhere near being morally certain. ‘I suppose it’s possible’ was about as far as I would go. However, although the King was, as the Scottish polymath Andrew Lang described him, ‘a tyrant … ambitious, cruel, and destitute of honour’, like all the Tudor reigns his was of immense historical significance. Further, there is something magnificent about his very evil; black-hearted he was but in no way half-hearted, and certainly he seemed to inspire as much awe and reverence among his subjects, even after he was dead and could do no more harm, as he did dread (rather like the even crueller Ivan the Terrible of Russia, a contemporary of Henry’s daughter Elizabeth).

People, I think, just want there to be descent from him to the present day, he is such a figure in English history, and the English imagination. And even genuine scholars have been seduced into believing that there is such; a belief, as I have sought to show, based on remarkably little evidence. It is possible of course, but it is very far indeed from being proved, and until it is my position that there is no known posterity from Henry VIII will remain.

While checking on something else I came across another royal descent for Queen Geraldine of the Albanians (see post #10). This was from Albrecht V, Duke of Bavaria, son-in-law of the Emperor Ferdinand I and grandfather of the Emperor Ferdinand II. His great-grandchildren included the Emperor Ferdinand III (twice), Felipe IV of Spain and the latter’s sister Archduchess Anna, wife of Louis XIII of France and mother of Louis XIV.

The descent (stage 1: stage 2) comes through Albrecht V’s second son Ferdinand, an interesting character, who married morganatically and whose issue were therefore Counts and Countesses of Wartenberg rather than Dukes and Duchesses of Bavaria. Although from an earlier time than Queen Geraldine’s better-known Anhalt descent this is a substantial addition, Ferdinand I with all the major figures contained in his ancestry not featuring in the lineage from Anhalt, and I thought it worth mentioning.

This and the following post are leftovers from an abandoned project, that I thought people might like to see. I have always been interested in not just the nearest ancestor tying individual sovereigns together, but the nearest ancestor tying them all together. Today, as frequently mentioned in these threads, that person is Jan Willem Friso, Prince of Orange (1687-1711). It was in 1939 also, as the table below shows, and had been since the previous year, with the death of Franz, Prince of Liechtenstein, who had been the only remaining monarch not descended from him.

Before that it was someone else, and I have a pretty good idea who. The idea was to go back and establish who the nearest common ancestor was for each of the thread years, presenting tables like that below. However I soon realised that the labour involved would be immense, the results uncertain and the gain in knowledge minimal, so gave up the idea.

The preliminary work is all that resulted from it, and is presented both here and in the next post. The latter will show the descents of the sovereigns of the present day from Jan Willem Friso, along with those of the next generation from Ludwig IX, Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt (1719-1790), who will replace Jan Willem Friso as nearest common ancestor of the European sovereigns when there is a change of reign in Britain. It will be noted, by anyone who cares to click the links anyway, that the descent shown for each of the heirs bar the Prince of Wales derives from their parent who is the current monarch (previous monarch in the case of Princess Caroline of Hanover). I possibly should have made the table current monarchs with the Prince in place of his mother, but didn't like to do that so did the heirs instead.

Sovereigns of 1939: descent from their nearest common ancestor, Jan Willem Friso, Prince of Orange

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